by Chris Froome
Having grabbed a few headlines through Peter Velits’s win in Cape Town, the Team Konica Minolta roster was quickly hoovered up by wealthier teams. That’s how it was and how it was supposed to be. You rode for a team like Konica Minolta on the way up. And perhaps on the way down.
Without the means to attract a new wave of Europeans, the team boss, John Robertson, opted to fill the gaps with home-grown talent for 2007. He pulled in Tiaan Kannemeyer and Jock Green and entered into negotiations with David George, the South African who had ridden with the US Postal Team alongside Lance Armstrong in 1999 and 2000. David had come home to win the Giro del Capo back to back in 2003 and 2004 with Team Barloworld, for whom Robertson had worked at the time.
I had known John Robertson for about a year, bumping into him regularly at races. In November at the end of the 2006 season John asked if we could have a chat. No strings attached but he had a team to fill. I had a sliver of credibility with some of the races under my belt and having been accepted into the UCI school. And my diary wasn’t exactly full.
We met in Pretoria and got on well. I came away without any promises but filled with some hope as I went back to studying in Johannesburg. Unbeknownst to me, David George was still exploring his options as the deadlines for team rosters were looming. Finally, John Robertson opted to put my name down as the last on his list for the 2007 season. The line-up was eight South Africans and one Kenyan.
I was a shot in the dark for John.
If the other riders or the sponsors had asked to see my CV, he could have shown it to them on the back of a matchbox.
Starting in January 2007 I would be paid €300 a month for riding a bike. No more spinning classes. I would ride the Giro del Capo for the team in March and then head to Europe and the UCI school in Aigle, Switzerland, for three months or so until being reunited with Konica Minolta when they came to Europe in the early summer.
I didn’t care about the threadbare CV.
For now, the country ahead was Lesotho. We arrived at Clarens near the border for Team Konica Minolta’s early-season training camp.
I was a professional cyclist with professional colleagues. It is true that I turned up on our first day of training riding a bike which was by some distance too small for me, a bike kitted out with components that most of my teammates wouldn’t consider suitable for a ride to the shops. I didn’t care. I was a pro.
On the training camp, though, there were regular reminders that I was very much the newbie. I didn’t have nearly as much experience as the other riders in terms of how things were done in a professional outfit. The guys would joke with me about my position on the bike: head down, elbows out. I didn’t fit the slick, pro-cyclist mould. Plus there were the kikoys and the numerous bracelets and necklaces that adorned my body.
On the last day of training, John organized a tough ride for us – a good number of miles finishing on a stiff climb. I was keen but the older riders had a different idea. They decided that we shouldn’t ride it flat out because this was only training after all. Instead, to keep John happy, we should simply make it appear as if we were riding at our limits.
This was awkward. John had told me before the ride that I would need to impress him to make the Giro del Capo selection. So I raised my issue with Jock Green and Tiaan Kannemeyer, the older guys on the team, telling them that I really needed to do my best to show John that I was good enough to make the cut. It was different being a rookie.
Jock and Tiaan agreed to let me ride ahead as if I were ‘attacking’ them. The caveat was that they told me to ride at about eighty per cent of my maximum effort and they would keep a reasonable distance.
When we got halfway up the climb, a couple of the sprinters dropped off the back of the group, giving the impression that we were going fast up at the front. This was my cue. I did a little acceleration, as if I were attacking, and it all seemed to be working convincingly for about two minutes. Then John pulled up next to me in the car, looked me up and down for a moment, and shouted, ‘Chris, ride your fucking bike!’
There was no choice. I pushed as hard as I could for the last kilometre to the top. I felt really proud of myself when John came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Listen, if you can ride like that in the Giro, you can win the fucking thing.’
I clung to Africa until the last moment. Not from sentiment, but because I wanted to get as much training into my legs as I could before I went to Europe. Maybe in Europe the six- or seven-hour days that I felt I needed would be frowned upon. So I did the Giro del Capo in early March for Konica Minolta (coming 6th overall and winning the best young rider’s jersey), and quickly went back to my training routine.
Lesotho again.
The lowest spot you can find in Lesotho is 1,400 metres above sea level, and eighty per cent of the country is at least 1,800 metres above sea level. It is lumpy terrain. If the people had bikes they would produce climbers for export. As it is, Lesotho’s national resources are water and diamonds and in late 2006 in the Maluti Mountains they eked the fifteenth-biggest diamond ever found out of the mine. It was a white diamond that they called Lesotho Promise.
Much further down the other end of the world economic spectrum, my €300 a month meant that I was able to establish a basic altitude-training camp for myself on the South African side of the border near Fouriesburg, just outside of Lesotho.
I went up there with a South African girl named Andrea I was seeing at the time. I think she expected some kind of a romantic getaway but she came up for the ten days of my home-made altitude camp and scarcely saw me.
I loved riding over the border with my passport in my pocket, ready to go up into the mountains, to leave all of my energy there and to return hours later.
Lesotho gave me a parting taste of real African soil. It is not a wealthy place and I needed to be careful of where I was riding. A white guy on a racing bike in the highlands was a rare sight. In fact, the bike alone would be a rare enough sighting for a Lesothan. I pushed myself hard up there. Sessions of five to seven hours doing huge miles with just one recovery day during the time that I was there. It was a strange feeling going from the familiar training routes around Johannesburg but my legs were ready. Even in Johannesburg I had been doing the same long hours most days, so these big days and big climbs were exactly what I had been getting ready for.
Life in Europe was due to start properly in Italy with the Giro delle Regioni, the annual six-stage road race for Under-23 riders. I arrived in Switzerland with just a couple of weeks to spare.
The UCI have had many bad ideas down through the years but the World Cycling Centre (WCC) on the land surrounding their headquarters at Aigle, in a crook of the Swiss Alps, was not one of them. For the first time I was part of a proper team set-up: bikes, kit, a room to ourselves, velodrome, gym and a canteen for all our meals.
After some days’ training in Switzerland, there followed a trip to Belgium to compete in the curtain-raising Liège–Bastogne–Liège Espoirs race for Under-23s. This is the factory floor for European cycling – the long rides, the one-day classics, the short, sharp climbs, the shoulder-to-shoulder jostling, the narrow and rapid descents – where riders are made into racers.
I didn’t like it much. I enjoy the first hint of elevation on a steep mountain, and if the mountain dwarfs us all, so much the better. I like stage races, those long wars of attrition. Who can suffer best? Who can suffer longest? These long hauls around the lowlands were never going to be my thing. I came 28th that day up in Liège, ahead of my UCI comrades but over a minute behind the winner, a rider called Grega Bole from Slovenia. It was a useful experience but I wanted to race in countries where the hills were mountains, and the climbs went on and on.
A few days later, in Italy for the Giro delle Regioni, a gang of us were in an SUV, heading to our hotel. It’s like the start of a bad joke. A Frenchman is driving. Sebastien is small and compact and drives with compacted fury. The team around me are two Koreans, a Colombian, an Algerian, a Chinese guy and me, a
Kenyan, often mistaken for a Brit despite never having been to Britain. Haijun Ma is the Chinese guy. We kid him all day about being too old for an Under-23 race. We demand to see his passport. He grins and says, ‘Shhhhhh!’
Travelling together like this was still a novelty for our team. We tucked in behind the GB team car in front of us. The car was being driven by a ruddy-faced guy whom I would come to know as Rod Ellingworth. Somewhere in the car were Ian Stannard and Ben Swift, who were learning their trade at Rod’s Italian academy. They are riding under the name 100% Me, an anti-doping initiative taken by David Brailsford at British Cycling.
100% Me was a very worthy and ground-breaking ethical statement but we were giddy and Sebastien was overexcited and aggressive and he drove our car right up Rod’s tailpipe. Rod, as I know now, is sensible and solid, and always law-abiding. He was in no mood to engage with a garçon racer on this windy climb. But Sebastien decided to push his luck and when we got to a really dangerous stretch of road, a bad bend on a blind hairpin corner on the windswept mountain, he overtook at speed.
There were whoops in our car but I remember thinking that we were about to become a carful of dead foreigners if we met a vehicle coming the other way. I looked across at the driver of the GB car and I could see a black cloud of rage crossing his face. Rod rage.
We were unpacking the car at the hotel when Rod arrived in the car park having observed the speed limit and all the other rules of the road and driver etiquette along the way. He was furious with Sebastien. ‘How dare you drive like that with youngsters in the car, you fool!’ he shouted. For most of the guys on the UCI team this was a comedy and Sebastien was their champ for driving really fast when some people would have been afraid to drive at all. I remember looking at the red-headed Rod as he seethed and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s so angry that his face has gone the same the colour as his hair. His face and his hair are both really, really furious.’
Day one of the Regioni was a standard affair, a circuit race followed by the predictable bunch finish. My main problem was staying in contact with the bike and with the road. At one point I even rode at speed into the driveway of a private house, coming to a halt just before I hit the garage. John Robertson, who was there with the South African Under-23 team, said later that his main memory of the day was frequent reports including the words ‘Chris’ and ‘Crash’ on the race radio. There were three riders called Chris in the race that day, but it didn’t take long for John to figure out that this series of unfortunate events was happening to the same Chris.
I had journeyed from Africa to Aigle with not much more in my account than potential. The roads I had worked on alone or with Kinjah and with Robbie had never offered the challenges that you find in the Alps, or any other self-respecting European mountain range. I had an odd flappy-bird style of riding, poor handling skills and, despite my training methods and eternal diet, still needed to lose at least a couple of kilos. On top of those handicaps came my lack of experience, which might have been considered harmlessly eccentric if it hadn’t been so annoying for other riders. When I had the strength in my legs to push on at a critical moment in the race, I was invariably starting from too far back and would try to overtake by weaving through the middle of the peloton where the traffic was most dense. Curses would follow me through the congestion.
My descending was also terrible. I wasn’t scared of falling off or of the speed of the downhill, but it might have been better if I had been. I would take risks, trying to go faster than everyone else on the corners, and although I had the cojones I lacked the bike-handling skills, a combination that led to a lot of crashes. Rod Ellingworth would later say that his riders spoke of how much space I was given on the descents. No one wanted to be too close. I could understand that.
I was suffering from a basic misconception. I know now that most of the brake work on a descent is done on the front wheel. Back then I reckoned that on a downhill the front brake would catapult me over the handlebars. The long, mostly straight descents in Kenya were no preparation for the winding roads of Europe. But as Rod would also say later, his riders also mentioned that I was pretty good going uphill.
I invested my hopes in the second stage, the first of the two mountaintop finishes. This stage was a loop around Città Sant’Angelo, a medieval town near Pescara. There were some decent climbs, including a good 6- or 7-kilometre ascent to the finish.
There were attacks all day. Under-23 races are filled with riders who have a desperate need to make a name for themselves. If you don’t succeed as an Under-23, it’s unlikely you’ll get the chance to do so afterwards. I hung in going up the final climb and as my legs felt good I rolled the dice and took a chance. I pulled away from the bunch in the company of a Russian rider, Anton Reshetnikov, and the Slovenian Grega Bole, whose back I had watched cross the finish line first in Belgium the previous week.
At a kilometre from the top we were clear of the pack behind us. Belgium hadn’t been my sort of terrain but this was.
Bole was on my wheel. I was sucking him along up the hill and I could tell from his quickening breaths that he was panicking. If he lost touch with me the peloton might swallow him up and then he would finish with nothing to show for his efforts. He wasn’t in a position of strength but he decided to negotiate:
‘Don’t drop me, don’t drop me. You can have the stage but don’t drop me.’
I had been in Italy in this dream world of professional cycling for only two weeks. This must be what the guys do, I thought. They cut deals. I have the power and I don’t need to start making enemies; I know I’m stronger. He can stay on my wheel and get his 2nd place.
We toiled round the last hairpin and the finish lay ahead of us, one last uphill straight. At this point in big races the small caravan of vehicles in front of the leaders vanishes, leaving the riders with nothing but clear road. With 100 metres to go, the cars and the motorbikes veered off to the right. I turned up the power and followed the vehicles.
Grega Bole rode straight on towards the finish line. I chased the vehicles. I chased the … uh oh.
By the time I realized my mistake and did a quick U-turn, the best I could do was claim 2nd place. As he watched me disappear down that side road, Grega forgot about our deal, though I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.
Still, the good definitely outweighed the bad that day. People were aware of how strong I’d been on the climb and I was startled to realize how comfortable I’d felt. I was losing too much time on the descents so a good overall GC (General Classification) result wasn’t going to happen that week. But while you can coach technical problems out of a rider, you can never turn a non-climber into someone who can win mountaintop finishes. I was pleased with how I had performed on the climbs and, overall, I was pleased with the way the week was panning out.
In any stage race the road gives and the road takes away. The third stage was the longest and by the time we got to Cignolo I had come off on another couple of descents and surrendered over a minute in time through poor handling.
Stage four was better and passed without major incident and then we were into serious climbing territory again. We were heading out from the quaint spa town of Chianciano Terme and finishing on Montepulciano, racing through 149 kilometres of rolling Tuscan hills.
Again, there were attacks all day. With 20 kilometres to go I was feeling strong and made a play of my own. I was followed by Cyril Gautier of France, Christoff Van Heerden of South Africa, the Australian Cameron Meyer, Claudio Apolo of Portugal and two Belgians, Tim Vermeersch and Detlef Moerman.
I don’t remember if it occurred to me how strange it was for a kid with the air of the Ngong Hills still in his lungs to be riding through Tuscany with French and Belgian riders by his side. If I entertained that thought, it was briefly. With 3 kilometres to go, Moerman and Meyer made a break of their own. Myself and Gautier chased them down.
On and on up the climb we went. The stage was going to fall to me or to the Frenchman. The pack were behind us but
I felt strong and sensed they wouldn’t have enough left for both the chase and the aftermath. With about a kilometre and a half to go, at the spot they call Porta al Prato, I kicked on. I felt comfortable again and the gap stretched. Gautier kept in touch like a relative who knew that if I died he would inherit the stage. With the finish in the Piazza Grande in sight, I emptied the tank.
A stage win. UCI code KEN 19850520 – this was the first Kenyan code to appear at the very top of a stage classification in a professional European race. The first ever. The world didn’t shake but there were decent riders on the mountain that day, including Rui Costa, Bauke Mollema, Ben Swift and Ian Stannard. Years later, people would say that I came from nowhere, but on this day I felt that little corner of Tuscany was somewhere.
Rod Ellingworth had his base not too far away at Quarrata. Rod watched me win and made a mental note.
Two meetings from that week stand out for me. Luca Scinto, a guy from Tuscany who was quite well known in Italian cycling, was there at the Regioni with an Under-23 feeder team. He grabbed me at the finish line one day and had someone translate the words of seduction. He wanted me to come to his team the next year. I was flattered. But when I relayed the story to a friend who’d spent some time racing in Italy, their response was not what I had expected: he was a controversial character. As it turned out, in 2013 two of his riders tested positive in the Giro.
The other meeting was with Rod. On the night of that fifth stage I didn’t waste any time, and with my stage win fresh in Rod’s memory I looked for his name on the room roster stuck to the lobby wall, and went and knocked on his door. He was there with the 100% Me team.
It would be interesting to ask Rod exactly what we said to each other because I don’t quite remember. He knew who I was by then, which was a start, and I know I would have told him that I wanted to get to Europe on a more full-time basis. I imagine he mentioned to me about racing under a British as opposed to a Kenyan licence.